QIII Benchmarks and Conclusions

Quake III is notorious for
loving high bus speeds/high memory bandwidth, and here, the higher bus speeds
let's crank up the resolution a bit to see what happens.

Quake
III Arena:Max 1024x768 demo001

Setting:

Score:

133 MHz

185.8 fps

164 MHz

203.1 fps

Quake III Arena: Max
1024x768 nv15demo

Setting:

Score:

133 MHz

47.3 fps

164 MHz

51.4 fps

Again, as we crank up the resolution, we see the same trend continuing. I
didn't benchmark any higher, because the video card would become the bottleneck
then.

So what can we conclude about the MSI K7T266Pro2-RU motherboard? Well,
put rather simply, it rocks!

Utilizing VIA's new
KT266A chipset, it's obvious here that MSI can have a winner. Can being
the key word. A few things they have to improve/fix first though, mainly this reboot
problem (I can confirm this happens on retail boards too) and if they could
release a BIOS that had more bus speed adjustments it would be surely be
a "kick ass" product.

Overall, I must say I was quite please with
the results of the K7T266Pro2. Obviously, VIA should have released this chipset instead of
the original KT266, but at least it's better late then
never.

If MSI can fix those
few problems we mentioned above they'll surely they will have a very, very attractive
mainboard solution. Heck, no one usually offers better value than
MSI anyway!